Weddingbee Blog

So here is a piece of advice from me to you. If you’re working with a vendor who comes with the package at your wedding venue… a cake vendor even… and said cake vendor offers you a trial of your cake. Take. It. Trust me, you can thank me for it later. Obviously, this is going to be a story about why I will never be sad that I did exactly that.

Yesterday we went on a wedding bonanza to get several things done at once. The first of which was a visit to the bakery to see the trial top tier of our cake. (Which I had wisely ordered the week before. Go me!) When we pulled up to the bakery, I pulled the cake inspiration picture out of my handy wedding folder so Mr. Lox and I could examine it and be ready to properly assess if the trial tier was correct. Just as a refresher, here is the cake-spiration we gave to the bakery.

Photo from The Knot/ Cake by Alliance Bakery in Chicago/Picture by Dayna Schroeder Photography

So pretty. On the phone last week, I told her I wanted it to look like this but with pink in place of the green. And, per my instructions, this is what they had for me today…

Personal Photo

Ummmm… yeah. I have to give it to them, it looks like what I asked for. But, you see, apparently sometimes I’m wrong. And this is obviously one of those times. The nice lady told me that she had some feedback but she wanted to see what I thought first. I mumbled something about the spiky bits, and she said she didn’t like the multi-colored trim. Which was really unfortunate because it was about the only thing I really did like. And I told her I actually liked it. At which point she said, and I really do quote… “Well, is your wedding really casual?” And she was met with a blank stare and then me saying “Well, it’s definitely not formal!”

So eventually we had to reach a truce. I’m going to be nice when I say that I do not have a poker face. In fact, I have the opposite of a poker face. I describe it as making faces like a muppet. And I was giving her a full on look of muppety disapproval, tinged with muppety happiness that we’d had a trial cake done. So we decided to break it down, put our heads together, and figure out how to save this poor little cake.

In the end, she pulled out pictures of another paisley cake she had done which was quite lovely. My muppety disapproval waned because I truly honestly and deeply liked the cake in the pictures. And this time it was her work so I knew it could be recreated. So we talked over how to tweak the colors and the design, and my poor inspiration picture ended up looking like this…

Personal Photo

The paisley paper up top is the pattern she used to design the cake I liked in the pictures. We edited the colors a bit, made a few other design decisions, and then I stopped making faces at the nice cake decorator. in fact, I felt so darn guilty over the whole thing that I thanked her multiple times for taking the time to help us and for being patient with me. And then we went ahead and bought the trial tier.

I mean, just because it isn’t pretty doesn’t mean it doesn’t taste good. (Quite the contrary in fact…it’s fantastic.)

So I feel more confident about our cake now. And about my bakery’s ability to create something I’d actually like to see later in pictures. I mean honestly, I’d rather not recreate the cake experience from my first wedding.

Did you get to do a trial run with your cake, or did you have full faith in the way it would turn out? And if you’re married…did it all work out?